A problem with marketing, whether it involves a conventional advertisement, a coupon, a discount code, or some other form of marketing, is that it often reaches individuals and businesses who are not interested in the promoted business, product or service, and may fail to reach those who are truly interested. Thus, a business pays for broad distribution of an advertisement through print or electronic sources to many consumers, including many who may not be receptive to the advertisement. By way of example a business may publish coupons in a newspaper or other printed publication. Many of those coupons will not reach interested consumers. Many of those coupons will reach consumers lacking interest in the subject matter. While online coupon delivery systems have been devised, such systems are relegated to coupon delivery and still require a consumer to request specific coupons.
Online advertising uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. It includes email marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, many types of display advertising (including web banner advertising). Like other advertising media, online advertising frequently reaches consumers who are not interested in the content and fails to reach those who may be truly interested.
Online advertisers (typically through their ad servers) often use cookies, which are unique identifiers of specific computers, to decide which ads to serve to a particular consumer. Cookies can track whether a user left a page without buying anything, so the advertiser can later retarget the user with ads from the site the user visited. As advertisers collect data across multiple external websites about a user's online activity, they can create a detailed picture of the user's interests to deliver even more targeted advertising. Often the picture is inaccurate. This aggregation of data is called behavioral targeting. Online advertisers can also target their audience by using contextual and semantic advertising to deliver display ads related to the content of the web page where the ads appear. Re-targeting, behavioral targeting, and contextual advertising all are designed to increase an advertiser's return on investment, or ROI, over un-targeted ads.
A problem with such online advertising is that it assumes, often erroneously, that a consumer's web search or a visit to a site or clicking of a hyperlink means that the consumer is interested in the subject matter. This is not always the case. Often, individuals visit online sites and select links inadvertently, mistakenly or indiscriminately, without an interest in the underlying subject matter. Occasionally, a consumer's interest may be transient. By way of example, after a consumer completes the purchase of a new home, that consumer may no longer be interested in home inspection services, notwithstanding prior web searches and online visits to websites promoting such services. In such a case, advertising dollars are squandered and the consumer is alienated if targeted banner ads continue to promote home inspection services to the consumer.
A related problem is unsolicited commercial email, often referred to as SPAM. Such email is often sent indiscriminately to all users on a list, regardless of their interests. Not only does such email consume storage and bandwidth, but it infuriates many consumers. Concomitantly, many email applications do a good job at identifying such email as SPAM and move them to a junk folder or delete them upon receipt. Thus, a consumer may never even see such email.
The invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems and solving one or more of the needs as set forth above.